Female Cantors Fill Temples With Song

At 9, she joined the choir at her New York synagogue and soon was singing "wherever I could get in," she said.

Yet, she ruled out a career in show business or theater.

"You get some of the same feedback, the same warmth" in theatrical work, she said, "but there's definitely this other component (with choral singing), which is your own communion with God."

Dorf had settled on a career in arts administration until she produced a program on Jewish music, "One People, Many Voices: Jewish Music in America," which was named best radio documentary in 1986 by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The program reminded Dorf of what she was missing and pointed to a career she hadn't considered: being a cantor, a spiritual leader who predates rabbis in the Jewish faith by 500 years.

Today, as the cantor at Temple Beth Hillel in the suburb of North Hollywood, Calif.

Dorf leads the congregation in prayers that their ancestors chanted thousands of years ago and songs that are hundreds of years old.

She also officiates with the temple's rabbi at such life-cycle rites as marriages, funerals and circumcisions or naming ceremonies for newborns. In addition, she helps prepare children for bar or bat mitzvahs, rites that welcome 13-year-old boys and girls as adult members of their congregations, and leads the temple's choir.

More women are entering the field, which prohibited female cantors as recently as three years ago.

Although some women complain that they still experience resistance to their chanting prayers during worship in synagogues, the change also has come with benefits.

Dorf, 35, says that the members of her congregation are forced to establish more personal relationships with her than with male counterparts.

"They have a powerful male image that they envision up there," she said. "It's hard to project that image on women. . . . It forces the congregation to start from scratch and build a new relationship."

The acceptance of women in the field also has alleviated pressure on Jewish congregations, which were facing a dwindling pool of spiritual leaders, much like the Roman Catholic Church with its prohibition on female priests.

In 1991, the Cantors Assembly, the world's largest cantorial organization, was not able to fill openings in 60 Conservative congregations across the country because of the shortage of cantors, said David Silverstein, cantor at Sinai Temple in Westwood, Calif.

"Today, the situation is much improved," said Silverstein. "We're down to 35 or 40" unfilled openings.

Only 34 of the assembly's 450 members are women, but that's a far cry from 14 just three years ago, and the ratio of women to men is growing.

Meanwhile, women make up 90 percent of the student body at the Cantors Institute of New Jersey's Jewish Theological Seminary, one of the country's three seminaries offering cantorial training, said Silverstein, who served from 1990 to 1993 on the institute's executive council.

The Reform movement, Judaism's most liberal branch, has been ordaining women as cantors for more than 20 years; that segment never prohibited it.

The Conservative branch, which prohibited female cantors, changed its policy in 1991 after three years of study. At that point, the Cantors Assembly began accepting women, including Dorf.

The Orthodox movement, the most traditional form of Judaism, does not allow women cantors or rabbis and is not expected to change.